The control system of a driverless vehicle relies on sensors to sense the surrounding environment including vehicles, pedestrians, traffic signs and the like. The driverless vehicle may usually be equipped with a variety of sensor devices to acquire a larger amount of information. Different sensors may complement each other, to provide more comprehensive information to the control system of the driverless vehicle for reception. A LIDAR sensor and a camera sensor are the two most common and at the same time the two principal sensor devices in driverless vehicles.
The LIDAR sensor scans the surrounding environment of the driverless vehicle by using laser and generates point cloud data, and the control system of the driverless vehicle can quickly and easily establish a three-dimensional model for the surrounding environment of the driverless vehicle by means of the point cloud data, so that the LIDAR sensor has become the most important vehicle sensor. The camera sensor may collect image information of the surrounding environment of the driverless vehicle. The control system of the driverless vehicle may combine the image information collected by the camera sensor with the point cloud data collected by the LIDAR sensor, to identify information, such as obstructions, traffic signs, etc., in the surrounding environment of the vehicle, and thus the camera is also a very important vehicle sensor.
The two principal sensors, namely the LIDAR sensor and the camera sensor, may cooperate with each other to cover a wider range, and the acquired information authenticates each other, to improve the environment identifying accuracy of the control system of the driverless vehicle, and to ensure the stability of the control system in the event that a single sensor is abnormal or has an malfunction.
Currently, however, a merging process is generally executed only on sensor data of the same type. Output data from different types of sensors are processed through separate collection, filtration etc. Data from different types of sensors are currently not merged. Primary causes are as follows: (1) the data collected by different types of sensors adopt different data formats, for example, the data collected by the LIDAR sensor is output in the point cloud format, and the data collected by the camera sensor data is generally output in the image coding format; (2) due to different hardware parameters in different types of sensors, there are certain variations in collection periods and collection frequencies of the different types of sensors, for example, a common LIDAR sensor has a collection frequency of 10 Hz, and a collection period of 100 ms. A camera sensor has a collection frequency of about 20-50 Hz, i.e., a collection period of 2-5 ms. Therefore, the control system of the driverless vehicle does not realize synchronized storage of data packets collected by the LIDAR sensor and data packets collected by the camera sensor.